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On Nov. 28, 1966, Susan Burke — then a 20-something model at Bergdorf Goodman — was sitting by the fountain of the Plaza hotel with her Harvard Business School boyfriend when she came up with a daring idea: “Let’s crash Capote’s big party.”

It wasn’t just any event, but rather the biggest blowout of the 20th century — the now-legendary Black and White Ball that author Truman Capote threw at the Plaza for 540 of the rich, famous and powerful.

Susan BurkeAngel Chevrestt

Dynasties such as the Astors, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers were represented, as were several generations of Hollywood: Tallulah Bankhead, Frank Sinatra and then-wife Mia Farrow, a 20-year-old Candice Bergen. The Maharani of Jaipur and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Authors James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams and Harper Lee made the guest list, along with Harry Belafonte, Andy Warhol and Capote’s “swans” — glamorous socialites such as Babe Paley.

For months, Capote, a notorious pot-stirrer, had been dangling invitations in front of people.

“It was devastating if you weren’t invited,” Deborah Davis, author of the book “Party of the Century,” told The Post. “He totally [angered] some people. He’d say, ‘Honey, maybe I’ll invite you and maybe I won’t.’ Some people even offered money, and that never worked.”

In the case of Burke, it just took a little moxie — and the luck of being dressed to fit the party’s eponymous dress code.

“I had on a little black dress and [my date] was in black tie. We’d just been at the Ski Ball for the US Ski Team,” the Upper East Sider, now a fixture at charity galas, told The Post. “I’d been reading all the stuff in the papers about Truman’s party so I said, ‘Let’s go crash it.’ My [boyfriend], who was very proper, Harvard and all that, said, ‘Absolutely not!’ But I said, ‘Come on!’ ”

The party had been going on for hours, and the guest-list attendants “were tired and weren’t paying much attention, so in we bopped, and all of a sudden we were standing in front of Truman,” Burke said.

Perhaps Capote, too, was tired — or perhaps by that point he’d imbibed quite a bit of booze, which would contribute to his death in 1984 — but the author, then 41, seemed to think he knew the couple.

‘He decided, ‘I’m going to give myself a big party.’’

“He said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, dears, come on in.’ He led us to a table and we sat down with these people who were kind of funny-looking,” Burke said. “So I turned to the man beside me and I said, ‘I think maybe you’re not New Yorkers.’ ”

As it turned out, Burke’s tablemates were among the guests of honor: the man was a police sergeant who had investigated the 1959 murder of the Clutters, a Kansas farm family, and had cooperated with Capote in writing his best seller about the case, “In Cold Blood.” That book, which focused on the author’s obsession with the killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith (both of whom were hanged in 1965 for the murders), shot the social-climbing Capote to international acclaim.

The Black and White Ball was supposedly held in honor of the author’s date for the night, Katharine “Kay” Graham — whose husband, Phil, the publisher of the Washington Post, had recently committed suicide — as Capote felt she needed cheering up. But author Davis noted that the party was also for the host himself.

“The ball was his way of celebrating his book,” she said. “He decided, ‘I’m going to give myself a big party.’ ”

Burke remembers watching “Frank Sinatra dancing with Mia Farrow. I was just a wide-eyed little dope back then. I didn’t really think about how great the party was. I just thought it was fun to crash it.”

Truman CapoteGetty Images

Some years later, she was at another fancy bash — one she had been invited to — when Capote snuck up behind her and began bitchily gossiping about some of the other big-name guests in attendance.

“He was bitingly funny, and I said, ‘Truman, why don’t I tell you a little story,’ and he said, ‘Yes, dear.’ And I told him, ‘I’m the person, the only person that you’ll probably ever meet, who crashed your Black and White party.’

“He loved it,” Burke said, “and for the rest of his life every time we ever saw each other he would grab me by the wrist, raise up my hand and tell everyone, ‘She crashed my party!’ ”

Jerry Oppenheimer’s 14th biography, “The Kardashians: The True, Untold Story,” will be published in 2017.